A scattered introduction

This first entry might be a bit all over the place because I am trying to summarize things that might be relevant in future posts.

Two passions of mine are learning, and self sufficiency. So, when you put them together you have learning about how to make or design things that I need/want.

The most recent culmination of these two motivations is the learning of SysML V2 textual (calling this SysML herein). SysML, as the name suggests, allows you to model systems using a language that the creators created. Out of the box it can work with cyber-physical systems. It is basically taking things (object ontology) and blending it with the actions (process ontology) these things do. In this way it is very expressive with regards to practical problems.

But I believe that it can also be used for more conceptual problems as well. I think the way that we represent systems in SysML is similar to how we represent conceptual models in general. A conceptual model can be derived from a field of study(somewhat) by taking a subject and finding everything about the subject. So, let's say you have a bucket of theories about the brain within the field of neuroscience. You could denote that this bucket of theories is representative of the underlying model of the brain. And I believe that this can very easily/accurately be described using SysML.

Who cares? What was once in natural language within a paper is now in a somewhat formatted language. I feel like before SysML languages were somewhat clunky, and specified in a domain that did not generalize well into others. I think this is the first time we have a modeling language that is this easy to use, as well as the ability to have one language and the ability to describe, seemingly, any field or problem. Information is no longer silo'd into fields, but cracked open to mix with other fields. To me, that's powerful.

I'm working on a video that uses 3blue1brown's manim library to try and explain some basics of SysML. I was thinking about doing a video on cosimulation (precursor to multiphysics) with Python, and the life cycle of a fruit fly. One thing I am starting to realize is the amount of time to figure out how to make a video works, at least with this first one, is longer than my ability to hold an interest in it is. So, I am pretty bored of this first topic already and want to move on. Right now I am pretty interested in learning science (and instruction design), and how you could use theoretical models to find points of maximum leverage with experiments. The idea with the videos was to learn a bit more about manim and the topic, and to measure interest in an area that I could potentially do a course on. I still need to make some celebration milestones for after it is made.

A side note is that this blog does not support video embedding(?) whether local or from somewhere on the internet. This is due to the markdown that I am writing in, being converted to HTML, doesn't have anything to say this is a video. So, if I want it from elsewhere I have to use a plugin, and if I want to use my own videos on my server I have to make my own plugin. Either way, it shouldn't be too bad, but that is a problem for when I have an edited video to put up and not now.

Youtube has been weird lately, and I don't think I want to put my eggs in that basket. With its instability I don't think it would make a good video hosting solution, let alone something that I would want to build an audience with for content marketing. I was thinking of something like Dailymotion? That's something that I need to look more into. If you have a video hosting platform that you think is pretty neat, let me know. All I am getting is listicles for Youtube altetrnatives.

Something that I am starting to notice of myself is the tendency to be overly proactive and overburdening things in the initial stage to the point that the result that I wanted is too far out of reach. Fun stuff.

I could probably prototype a course on the blog, see what works, then package it together and sell it. So, as my trusted guinea pigs you get to see the rough draft for free.

If you have anything positive to say, feel free to leave a comment. Logging in is done via OAuth, and the comments are store on a redis database that I have hosted somewhere.